Monthly Archives: December 2012

Back in July I wrote about building a new, friendly map editor for OpenStreetMap in JavaScript. Since then, and in particular in the last two months, the project has come on in leaps and bounds – and today marks the first alpha release.

Codenamed iD, it aims to provide an easy-to-use, comfortable editing environment for the OpenStreetMap newcomer that’s nonetheless fully featured – you’ll be able to edit any OSM data with it. Clear modes such as “Move map” and “Add point” make it easy to get started without having to read swathes of instructions.

So – try it out! You can play with a working instance at geowiki.com/iD. It’s connected to a test database, not the main OpenStreetMap database, so don’t worry – you won’t break anything.

If you find a bug, use github to check it’s not already been reported, and file one if not.

The fast progress over the past few months is entirely down to the work of Tom MacWright and Saman Bemel Benrud, John Firebaugh, and others. Some of them have been funded to work on this by a Knight Foundation grant from the Knight News Challenge programme.

As ever with OpenStreetMap, the code is fully open source, and we’re looking forward to the community getting involved with helping to build the project. For the first time since OSM was founded in 2004, this will give us a full suite of editing tools – iD and mobile tools for new users, Potlatch 2 and Merkaartor for intermediate editing, and JOSM for power users – so that anyone can bring their local knowledge to the map, whatever their expertise.

The OpenStreetMap foundation announced today, another new tile caching server. That’s three new servers that have been donated in 2012Q4, for those keeping score at home. 🙂 See the details on the OSMF Blog.

Thanks to generous donations and active members of the OpenStreetMap community, OpenStreetMap infrastructure continues to grow.

A new tile server, Lurien, has been added to the OSM tile cache network. Located in Pau, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France, Lurien is currently serving tiles to IP addresses from France, Spain, Portugal, Andorra, Gibraltar, Italy, Monaco, San Marino and Vatican.

Lurien, highlighted.

Map tiles are delivered to users based on their GeoDNS location. The OpenStreetMap Foundation seeks additional distributed tile servers. If you would like to donate a tile server and hosting, please see the Tile CDN requirements page on the wiki.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organization, formed in the UK to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project. You can support OpenStreetMap by donating to the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

Today is International Volunteer Day. OpenStreetMap is all about volunteers of course. It’s about people getting out there and mapping their neighbourhood. If we have enough people volunteering in this way (just a little of your time, and local knowledge) we’ll have a free map of the world in no time!

But did you know OpenStreetMap is made up entirely of volunteers? Sometimes people assume that OpenStreetMap is a commercial company alongside other map providers, but OpenStreetMap is something different. It’s an internet-based collaborative project. Not only the mappers, but the entire organisation is built and driven by volunteers in their spare time.

The people who develop the website and the map editing software …all volunteers.

The people who maintain the servers and keep the database and map view operating smoothly …all volunteers.

The people in the working groups of the OpenStreetMap Foundation …all volunteers.

The people on the OpenStreetMap Foundation board …all volunteers.

We do occasionally discuss the idea of paying people in various roles of the foundation, but as it stands at the moment OpenStreetMap is an entirely volunteer-driven organisation from top to bottom. We’ve got where we are through the hard work and dedication of people who give up their spare time to the project. Hats off to the volunteers of OpenStreetMap, and a very happy International Volunteer Day!